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Svetha Janumpalli thinks you can save a child for the cost of a pair of shoes. The 26-year-old, who was named on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list this year, is moving to Nigeria from San Francisco in two weeks time to prove her point. For the past few years Janumpalli has been building New Incentives, an organization that pays people in poverty small sums of money regularly to go to an HIV clinic or give up child labor and go to school.

After college, Janumpalli went to India and Bangladesh to interview microfinance recipients. Over the past decade, micro-lending had gained an almost cult-like following with development economists as a savvy alternative to traditional aid. By providing microfinance, loans meant to provide cash for small business ventures, people had a way out of long-term dependence on handouts. Or so it was thought.

Svetha Janumpalli, CEO and Founder of New Incentives

Janumpalli interviewed “dozens and dozens of borrowers,” who were drowning in debt after taking out loan after loan to cover the cost of basic healthcare or education. Shocked, she started looking in to alternatives.

She found out about Conditional Cash Transfers – paying families to send their kids to school rather than staying at home or being forced in to child labor. The idea appealed to her because she’d seen how tough it is for families to go to a clinic or keep their kids in school when they’re living in extreme poverty.

A woman who works as a hawker in a market, for instance, wouldn’t earn any money to feed her other children if she went to a free HIV clinic that day.

Janumpalli was also sold on a body of evidence from governments who’d been using the model for years. The Mexican government’s Opportunidades program for example, offers a number of incentive-based steps which improved child health and nutrition, as evidenced by children gaining a centimeter in height.

Starting with a pilot program paying families to send their children to school in India, Janumpalli is now focusing New Incentive’s limited resources on preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV in Nigeria. The country accounts for 30% of mother-to-child HIV transmission and 70% of people live on less than a dollar a day. The women get a small payment everytime they’ve received a treatment in a clinic, proved by their geotagged doctors’ notes.

One of the great “aid myths” according to Janumpalli is that we’ve got to build more and more clinics and schools. Instead she’s focusing on clinics that are being underused.

“There’s tons of empty clinics and schools all around the world,” she says. People know the clinics are free and are aware of them, but everything else in their life – feeding their children, cultural and religious distrust of the clinic – is preventing them from making the trip there, says Janumpalli.

She’s had to build New Incentives from the ground up because no traditional aid organizations wanted to get involved. “I was pitching it to organizations like Save The Children saying, I’ll build the technology platform, I’ll find the team,” she says. “But they said they weren’t interested because they just don’t trust the poor or don’t believe it will work.”

She’s pulled in $260,000 in financing so far from San Francisco by emailing people, going to events and cold calling. “I was from Wisconsin, I didn’t go to Stanford - I didn’t have any contacts,” she laughs.

At heart, Janumpalli is approaching this like a startup. She’s frustrated with traditional aid’s emotive approach.

“Most people that go into aid because they think they’ve had a great idea. It’s all ‘I went on a bus ride in India and I saw all these poor women and now I want to help them,’” she pauses. “I think it’s selfish.”

“Do I want to be in a place where those emotions influence what I do or do I want to use objective thinking, working like a for-profit does?” she says. “This is what research is telling us, it’s what the world’s poorest want.”

She sees moving to Nigeria as an experiment in proving the model, and if it doesn’t work, she’ll go back to the drawing board. “We’re not in it to see it succeed but to see if it works,” she says.